There are numerous ways to approach the legitimation of power in industrial societies. We shall treat the legitimation process as a communicative task addressed to the mobilization of members ' commitment to the goals and institutionalized allocations of resources that translate social goals into daily conveniences, rewards, and punishments.1 Along these lines we can formulate a first gloss on the legitimation problem in the following terms : the legitimacy of any political system requires that (i) its members have access to the channels whereby social goals arc articulated (ii) that to varying degrees, members are aware of and feel entitled to exercise their rights in the translation of subjective needs into specific and local allocations of institutional resources and (iii) that members' troubles with the determinate processes of resource allocation establish prima-facie claims for reforms at level (ii) or change of goals at level (i). The interrelationship or loop-effect between the prccccding processes represents a normative formulation of the legitimation process as a communicative community. Whenever there are gross faults in the articulation of goals, access to means, deprivation of rights, in short, where there are practices of misinformation, false consciousness, and ignorance, as well as forceful exclusions, we may speak of repressive communication.2 In strictly normative terms, the practices of repressive communication lower the legitimacy of the political system. In practice, however, they may well contribute to its integration as a system o (power. The preceding propositions stand as a gloss or idealization upon the communicative processes they seem to describe inasmuch as they are perfectly elliptical with respect to the endogenous orders of practical reasoning, expressions, and displays that accomplish the mundane work of legitimation. The fix on the problem of order which appears through the functionalist metaphors that tie these propositions consists solely in the result that such talk cannot fail to locate the sources of order and disorder as an aesthetic product of its own speech. Moreover, the same aesthetic bias rules conflict theory which otherwise claims a more adequate grasp of the problem of order. Rather than reject these first approximations, we treat them as providing for a reasoned conjecture with respect to the problem in hand whose sensible nature otherwise remains for study as the situated and endogenous communications through which members provide for the work of political legitimation.3 In view of the intractability of the separation between ethical and repressive communication that may nevertheless integrate the political system, we are obliged to reconjecture the legitimation problem as the communicative task of maximizing the ethical probability that the political system will mobilize commitment, apart from consideration of members' actual beliefs and loyalties, and in ways that are recognizable resources of rule and participation.